1.3 is nearly ready, September release. Focus is on UI improvements based on player feedback. Reduce micro-management. This was the first of the post-release updates based on player feedback. Basic stab at planetary automation.

So this brings us to 1.4.

1.4 is almost purely about AI and game balance. There will be more work on the governors.

We ARE going to get rid of the per planet spending wheel. I know many of you like it but it is just incredibly tedious to deal with and violates the general spirit of GalCiv (there's a reason we never had this in previous GalCivs, it's not like we hadn't thought of it). In its place will be something different. We'd like to hear what YOU would like to see in there.

The AI work is going to focus on AI adaptation to player strategies and adding more goodies for modders to create custom AI mods. The measurable objective for 1.4 is that on NORMAL the AI should be able to beat most players with the higher levels being substantially improved.

Part of the improvements will come from design changes. The game isn't designed with players getting >1 million credits per turn for instance. So there will be some balance work to address some of the unintentional exponential growth tweaks.

Another area of improvements will come from improvements to the AI trading.

We ARE going to get rid of the per planet spending wheel. I know many of you like it but it is just incredibly tedious to deal with and violates the general spirit of GalCiv (there's a reason we never had this in previous GalCivs, it's not like we hadn't thought of it). In its place will be something different. We'd like to hear what YOU would like to see in there.

from both mofdder & player perspective, my wish list here:

a scroll bar of some kind on the governors list so modders can add new ones and just have them populate

give them a mouseover tooltip box that gives more details about what that governor does

let us configure all 3 axises on the governorbonusdefs.xml

a rate that the governor can shift the sliders perturn (i.e. if a governor could do 10/turn it would take 10 turns to shift from 0 ->100)

if these are completely irrelivant, can you post some info in one of the modding forums on the likely xml structure of the new thing?

The AI work is going to focus on AI adaptation to player strategies and adding more goodies for modders to create custom AI mods. The measurable objective for 1.4 is that on NORMAL the AI should be able to beat most players with the higher levels being substantially improved.

great, can you give any info there before 1.4, maybe even posting an xml file or two making use of the new stuff in development to let modders comb their imaginations through if you (understandably) don't want to give too many details before it's done & confirmed deliverable?

In its place will be something different. We'd like to hear what YOU would like to see in there.

If you are going for something different and the theme is going to be "less micromanagement", how about turning the buildings vs. population the other way round?

In the current system you have a population that produces "generic work" that is then split with the eco wheel and then these are affected by the bonuses from the buildings. The need for the eco wheel comes from the basic setup that you have a population generating the base points. What if it wasn't?

Alternative idea: make the buildings output directly manufacturing, science and money and have the population affect that output. Define how much population a single building of a given type needs to function at "normal" level and then penalize the output it if you have more buildings than population to run them, and perhaps some kind of diminishing returns if you have more pop than buildings that can use them, or even turn the over-population into "generic workers" that produce some small amount of manufacturing. The adjacency bonuses can stay, won't harm the concept.

The result of this is that now you have no need for the eco wheel at all!. The specialization of the planet is entirely determined by the buildings on it. What's more, the population growth imposes a limit on how fast you actually should build improvements as empty buildings won't give you much until you have the population to run them.

From the point-of-view of having fun, this gives the player the freedom to specialize his planet to however he likes but he doesn't need to do anything else than think which improvements he should build. From the AI point-of-view its specialization task got lot less hard. All it now needs is to determine a build-queue and manage it with some awareness to the population level and that's it. Player happy and AI competitive and lots of micromanagement cleared away.

First up, excellent news on the AI stuff. And I'm glad that you're consulting with the community.

We'll save the wheel discussion for the end, as I suspect you're going to get a lot of resistance on that. When it comes to balance, the problem is simply that there's too much of everything. That's all. The bonuses from buildings are too high in pretty much all cases compared to the cost of, well, anything. Just reducing pretty much all values by 30-50% will help.

Consider the humble factory. Currently, factories progress as 25%,30%, 40%, 55%, 75%. These totals are simply too high, when a factory planet might have anything upto 15-20 factories, this gives vast, 1000%+ bonuses to output on factories by endgame. This is why you have massive overproduction. Just look at the bonuses you get from relics - a top-level archaeology lab gives +40% to a stat EMPIRE-WIDE PER RELIC. If I have 5 manufacturing relics, I get 200% bonus manufacturing on every world... This is the kind of manu bonus that a size 10 industry world should be aiming for in total, not something handed out globally.

Combined with this are farms; these are also too powerful when 1 pop = 1 prod. We see players here with 150+ populations, covered in factories and hitting insane totals. If populations are to be allowed to get this high, then nerf production from population.

If we have production totals of 150, then bonuses from factories need to be nerfed massively. If we have factory totals of 1000%+, then food bonuses needs to be nerfed. It's pretty simple, tbh; pick what you want the highest manu per turn from a single planet to be (say, 500). Then decide how big you want populations to get - say 50. Now we just aim to make top-tier factories only produce enough industry to get planets up to that level - in this case, 20 factories producing 1000% bonus. Ergo, each top-tier factory gives 50%. Reduce everything else in line - so the factories go 10,20,30,40,50% rather than the present 25,30,40,55,75. This also has the advantage that if the AI chooses to upgrade factories rather than building out across the planet, it's not gimping itself.

I prefer the option of nerfing factories/labs/markets for this, as it reduces the difference between low-manu planets and high-manu planets - they can be 4-5 times as powerful as other planets rather than 15-20 times as powerful. This allows you to reduce the difference in timing between research world upgrades and industry world upgrades. But you could equally put it the other way - nerf farms to only increase by 2 food /level, or reduce population's production output by 50%.

In sum, if we're talking balance, we need to be working with smaller numbers. 5% increase per level in output is plenty. Top-level factories which are even just twice as good as bottom-level ones are still going to be plentifully powerful when you can have 10 of them.

As to the AI. I know you're not a big fan of scripted AI. I'm not either, tbh, despite scripting it. I'd much rather you produced some amazing stuff in the C. HOWEVER, that said, I don't think you're going to produce something amazing in the C in next two months. I have faith that 2 or 3 years down the line, the AI will be awesome; I don't have much faith that 2 or 3 months down the line you will have brought it up to a standard where it can beat the human reliably without bonuses. You have other things to do at the same time, and people rely on you doing those things so they can get paid and feed their families. So what I suggest is that we both hold our noses and you go ahead and put in some more script triggers for the scripted parts of the AI for now, in the full intention of getting rid of them later, so that in the short term we can script up something a bit more effective. It's a placeholder, but it needs to be a place holder for a long time while different modules are moved from the scripts to the full AI. Shifting stuff like the planet build queues to AI, then the blueprints etc will give incremental increases, but we need the AI to be able to manage it's economy effectively in the mean time - and that means we need more script triggers to tell it when to do things. Hell, you could even hold a forum competition - free SD games for life for the first person to script an AI that beats Brad. That way, you not only get a bunch of cool scripts to add into the game, but you also galvanize the community and drive involvement. I'm willing to bet I know 5 or 6 modders who would start scripting tonight.

Now, onto the death of the wheel... I understand why you want to do this; Paul, in fact, just outlined it on the stream. And I don't think it's necessary. There's been many suggestions for ways to make micro-managing the wheel less problematic - planet grouping is a forum favourite - so eliminating micro isn't the main reasoning here. The main driver of this is that players can achieve massive output from using it. But I suggest this is a balance issue - not a systemic one. I think that a significant re-balancing of the economy in a generally downward direction would eliminate the game-breakingly vast outputs that some players are getting. Combine that with teaching the AI to specialize (which is already present in proto-form in the governors). Whether we like it or not, the wheel is an integral part of the economic game in GC3; unless you re-implement something entirely different (like abandoning population=production and returning to the GC2-style money economy in it's entirety, or adopting Petri's population = % bonus and factories give flat bonuses) the wheel needs to stay.

I'd suggest that, before you go to the effort of removing the wheel and thinking up a replacement, you do the re-balance first and then see how that goes before making the decision. The fundamental mechanics of the economic model are sound. The values which it is using presently are crazy, but that's a reason to change the values, not re-design the system from scratch. The algebra is good, it's just the math that's bad

I'm not really bothered by the economy wheel, if you guys think you can make something better than it be my guests. I have my own gripes.

1. LEP. I dislike the Large Empire Penalty. First off it's broken, it's formula is basically (Raw Approval - LEP) + Bonuses, I haven't checked lately so I apologize if it was fixed. Second off it doesn't make sense to me that if I colonize a new planet the citizens on my existing colonies would get upset. I suggest it be reworked to be a maintenance cost based on how many colonies one has.

2. Colonizing new planets has no drawbacks, well except LEP, but even at 0% approval you're empire can still function. I suggest Colony Capitals be given a maintenance cost to offset this.

3. As I mentioned having low approval isn't that bad, I think it might make colonies more likely to culture flip, but I'm not sure. It'd be fun if colonies with very low approval might become independent. Sorta like becoming a minor faction.

4. This ties in with 1 and 2, Usually I play by keeping my empire at a 50/50 split between manufacturing and research, so by implementing 1 and 2, I couldn't do this and might even have to specialize some colonies to be money making worlds.

buildings=output would work. It abandons the pop=production system, but if you're willing to go that far then it'd kill the need to ever go back to a planet after setting up the initial build queue. The downside is, if your economy starts tanking you can't do much about it.

I hope that the AI realizes that the player WILL attack it at some point (even though that may not happen), and always try to prepare for that moment. That doesnt mean stationing huge amount of forces along the border, but it does mean keeping enough reserve forces to defend key installations (shipyards, starbases, important planets), and keeping enough ships nearby to respond to an invasion. Right now the AI never responds adequately even though it knows the player is stationing along its border (as it warns about that). It also never responds if a player starts positioning fleets inside its territory as I can waltz fleets right up to key targets and in one opening turn heavily damage the AI by wiping out its whole frontier. As soon as I move 1 fleet across its border without permission it should be an immediate declaration of war and hopefully the AI saw me coming and is prepared to counter attack.

buildings=output would work. It abandons the pop=production system, but if you're willing to go that far then it'd kill the need to ever go back to a planet after setting up the initial build queue. The downside is, if your economy starts tanking you can't do much about it.

You could make the argument that if you (as the player) let it go that far, that's your punishment for playing poorly.

I really would like the AI make "reads" on what the player will do based on what happened in previous games- sometimes (not every time- because that would also be predictable)

That's actually pretty tough to do & takes a phenomenal amount of data to crunch from in order to get something useful, chess playing programs do it all the time & they cull from thousands upon thousands of games where the pieces have a much more restrictive set of options at any given time. They do it by looking at their current options and comparing it to successful strategies given a similar situation.. then doing it for the branching pathways several steps ahead ie:

Sep1 if A has 2 options, run both & A1 & A2... the analyze

Step2 based on the result of A1 What reactions can be made... run them all & call them A1_O1 through A1_oN where N = some# Lets say there are 2

Step1 Based on A1_o1, run step2 against A1_o1

Run step1 based on A1_o2 call it A1_o2_t1 & A1_o2_t2

run step2 against A1_o2_t1

Run step3 against...

run step3 against...

rubn step3 against...

run step2 against A1_o2_t2

Run step3 against...

run step3 against...

run step3 against...

That's just a highly simplified & abstracted summation of it, but I don't even want to imagine how out of control it would get just how fast. Machine learning is even worse & you get completely bizzare results sometimes, I was hoping to find an article I remember coming across where this thing spontaneously learned to recognize certain types of tools held between very sppecific30some & 40 some degrees but not if they were held at other angles outside that range... but I couldn't find it and that works just as well because it goes into just what it took to teach it to intentionally recognize cats.

I would like the AI to respect your Area of Influence more (unless it's already planning on going to war with you). If it sees an uncolonized Class 8 planet or unmined Duritanium in my area, it should not attempt to take it unless it wants to fight me for it (i.e. dislikes me and/or does not fear my military).

This won't help all the players womping Genius AIs by turn 100, but it should make the game less infuriating for more average players.

In its place will be something different. We'd like to hear what YOU would like to see in there.

If you are going for something different and the theme is going to be "less micromanagement", how about turning the buildings vs. population the other way round?

In the current system you have a population that produces "generic work" that is then split with the eco wheel and then these are affected by the bonuses from the buildings. The need for the eco wheel comes from the basic setup that you have a population generating the base points. What if it wasn't?

Alternative idea: make the buildings output directly manufacturing, science and money and have the population affect that output. Define how much population a single building of a given type needs to function at "normal" level and then penalize the output it if you have more buildings than population to run them, and perhaps some kind of diminishing returns if you have more pop than buildings that can use them, or even turn the over-population into "generic workers" that produce some small amount of manufacturing. The adjacency bonuses can stay, won't harm the concept.

The result of this is that now you have no need for the eco wheel at all!. The specialization of the planet is entirely determined by the buildings on it. What's more, the population growth imposes a limit on how fast you actually should build improvements as empty buildings won't give you much until you have the population to run them.

From the point-of-view of having fun, this gives the player the freedom to specialize his planet to however he likes but he doesn't need to do anything else than think which improvements he should build. From the AI point-of-view its specialization task got lot less hard. All it now needs is to determine a build-queue and manage it with some awareness to the population level and that's it. Player happy and AI competitive and lots of micromanagement cleared away.

I like this. Perhaps add a focus option that would fill which ever building type you were focusing on before putting population into other buildings.

Edit: Or since the goal is less micromanagement keep the empire wheel and have it allocate population instead of production.

Petri, your suggestion is exactly how it was in GCII. Buildings gave a flat rate of raw production modified by population. We have come full circle. The current way we do things was to try something different from GCII.

I know that Paul did a great job making GCIII as much like GCII but different. I also love the wheel but realize we as players will ALWAYS crush the AI if allowed to min/max our planets research and production.

Also the adage 'if it aint broke dont fix it' seems to apply here. The GCII game production/research was global and never had planetary micro. It allowed the ai to compete with us very well as Brad could code scripts and behavior without having to worry about its keeping up with players on those areas (research and production.)

I am cautiously optimistic about the changes. I am old and HATE change but I know that it is always good to at least see how it works out.

First off I love this game I love Stardock and my thoughts are only meant to make the game better so as Brad would say the AI can kick my butt. My problems with the AI (I play on Incredible difficulty mainly, godlike requires too much micromanagement for my taste)

The AI never builds ships with the right defense against my weapon type. I can understand at the start of the war but 50-300 turns into a war not putting up any armor vs my mass drivers is insane.

The AI never adds special ship parts to boost weapons/defense/healing etc.

The AI never prioritizes ship mass in technology selections or in leveling up their Hyperion shinker. More mass equals more weapons/defense/engines/etc. My ships have double the space the AI has.

The AI likes to park fleets of ships next to all my planets and starbases and just leaves them there forever. Most the time I end up declaring war just to remove the ships. Also by parking the ships there for so long they are vastly underpowered to my ships. I normally only need a fleet of 2-3 medium ships to take out 4-6 fleets, of any size, per turn per fleet. I would rather see the AI build faster stronger ships and position fleets near my boarder. Then when they have a few fleets attack me. I would have to change my entire game play if the AI could pull that off.

The AI is incapable of building up improvements on a planet. Most the time now I just destroy the planet if it is under level 12. I just do not want to wipe the planet and start over. It would be nice to have a remove all improvement button on a newly captured planet.

The AI never uses the adjacency bonus correctly. The AI might get a few like improvements next to each other but never makes a true hub with the most powerful improvement in the middle and 6 like improvements around it.

The AI likes to build resource improvements over basic improvements with little to no production to build the improvement. Also the resource improvements are rarely placed next to a like improvement. I see thorium research improvements next to farms more than I do research improvements. Most the time I think they are hospitals, which the AI rarely builds.

I would love to see a build order on the AI planet that makes sense. 1-3 factories, 1-2 farms, a hospital, 1-2 research and then everything else. Also would like the AI to build specialized planets.

Trade is a complete break to the game right now. A modifier needs added to how the race feels about the player. I should never be able trade and get warfare techs with a race that is hostile with me just as easily as a race that I am allied with. I think with negative relations I should basically get nothing or it cost so much it is worthless for me to try.

The AI places too much value on resources in trades. I can easily trade off resources that I get back, for technologies.

The AI places too much value on diplomacy treaties like map sharing, free trade, alliance, etc... I can pretty much get almost all technologies from any AI at any relations level every 15 turns. Even when I play with tech trading off I can take all of AI money every 15 turns.

The AI needs better technology selections. First 50 turns researching weapon techs over empire building techs are very hurtful to the AI. I could understand some warmongering races doing this but all AI seam to do this.

We ARE going to get rid of the per planet spending wheel. I know many of you like it but it is just incredibly tedious to deal with and violates the general spirit of GalCiv (there's a reason we never had this in previous GalCivs, it's not like we hadn't thought of it). In its place will be something different. We'd like to hear what YOU would like to see in there.

I think it is only tedious if you put the pressure on yourself to adjust it every turn so that it is always optimal. I don't do that. I adjust the wheel only when the mission of the planet radically changes, for example if the all the improvements are build the wheel goes to focus on research or money. Or if it is a planet with a shipyard I adjust the wheel only if the ships being build change - for example from constructors to heavy cruisers. I know I'm wasting production because I'm not adjusting every turn but who cares?

And I got to say I love being able to focus a planet! It is just incredible satisfying to change the wheel to another focus and see the money output change from 0 to 1000. It makes me feel like I accomplished something by putting some thought into the development of the planet.

So I can't tell you how it should look like, but please keep the ability to focus a planet in the game.

We ARE going to get rid of the per planet spending wheel. I know many of you like it but it is just incredibly tedious to deal with and violates the general spirit of GalCiv (there's a reason we never had this in previous GalCivs, it's not like we hadn't thought of it). In its place will be something different. We'd like to hear what YOU would like to see in there.

If you remove the wheel, please consider buffing/tweaking the unique buildings a bit, so we can micromanage and specialize there instead. The Galaxy wonders could be a fun addition to tweak at the same time, so they act more like "super-uniques" on a planet. Also consider removing all upgrade paths for the unique buildings, it's mostly just confusing and buggy as it is now. (and then we can get more of them to build also, win-win)

Probably too much to ask, but some more resource tied uniques would be cool as well. Not everyone starts with Thulium etc. for the labs, or Durantium for factories. If there were some tech specialization with buildings as rewards instead of the boring % increases it would be awesome. I.e at the first research specialization tech, you get the choice of a passive bonus to research, a new unique building requiring Elerium or something, and some gold saving thingie that actually works. (% maintenance reduction sucks) So, if you have Thulium, you probably don't want to pick that Elerium building, and so on. This would make available some choices that aren't cut and dry for every game you play, forcing you to adapt a bit to the map.

We ARE going to get rid of the per planet spending wheel. I know many of you like it but it is just incredibly tedious to deal with and violates the general spirit of GalCiv (there's a reason we never had this in previous GalCivs, it's not like we hadn't thought of it). In its place will be something different. We'd like to hear what YOU would like to see in there.

A ) I know this is in vain, but please don't remove the planetary wheel. I understand why you want to remove it; but for me, it is intrinsic to the game. Managing my planets is the most fun part of the game for me, and it bums me out that I won't be able to do it in as much detail anymore because some players find it overwhelming and the AI can't compete with it.

B ) That said, I have an idea that keeps the spirit of the current economic model in place:

2. Each civ has a default specialization score, say 40% base. That score represents how far they can push the slider in that direction.

Examples: A civ with a 60% specialization that sets their planet to Research/Balanced would put out 60% research/

20% manufacturing/ 20% economy.

The same Civ could set their planet to Manufacturing/Research and get 60% manufacturing/40% science /0% economy.

3. Specialization is improved on a planet by planet basis by adjacency bonuses. Instead of adjacency bonuses giving direct bonuses which get out of hand pretty fast and unbalance the games economy as a whole, they allow the world to further specialize and have a natural hard cap at 100%.

4. Specialization score is separate for each setting. So a planet might have 40% research specialization, 40% leisure specialization, 55% economic specialization, and 85% manufacturing specialization, based on how they arrange their buildings.

5. No planet can have the same primary and secondary focus.

6. Leisure is a new category used for fueling projects. This way manufacturing worlds aren't more flexible that other worlds: any world can set a portion of their population aside to make babies or pursue their own research or entrepreneurial interests, or further the reputation of their home planet. Leisure is always 0% if not set as the the primary or secondary focus. This is not really core to my idea, but I think it would be a good solution to the problem currently presented by planetary projects.

7. Planets connected to shipyards also have a manufacturing focus. If the planetary wheel is going, the social/military slider has to go to, as it is the source of at least as much, if not more, micro as the wheel. So once you hook up your planet to a shipyard you can can set your planet to military, social or balanced. You can always spend 100% of your manufacturing on social, but your base Military specialization skill would be lower, like maybe 60%. Social focus would set you to 100% social, balanced would set you to 50/50, and military focus would set your military spending to your planet's military specialization score.

I won't mind if you remove the planetary wheel, with one exception. After I colonize a planet I like to put it into 'full production' mode and kick-start some buildings... if I can't do that, then building factories on every planet becomes a necessity, which pretty much breaks the concept of specializing worlds. If a planet is tailor-made for research (for example) but it will take 10 turns to build each lab - then that isn't going to happen. If I have the rest of my empire running nicely and research Extreme Colonization (or Atmospheric Cleansing) then I suddenly need to put a few worlds on max production - but not my whole empire. If I can't max them out then they will never finish anything.

I like the idea of having buildings generate as much manufacturing, money or research as they have people to work in them, with the caveat that 'unemployed' people should weigh heavily against your approval. Or you could just put two little mutually-exclusive buttons on the planetary screen: emphasize manufacturing, and follow the empire wheel. But if you do that, then also put the buttons - or a display of some kind - on the Colonies list on the Govern page.

When you prepare the AI, please give it the option (perhaps some random chances) to guess wrong and make occasional slip-ups. I've said before, I most enjoy an AI opponent that 'feels' real, even if it isn't playing at absolute perfect maxed-out advantage. Personality beats perfection.

For shipyards, I'd prefer that they have a 'cap' on how much production they can put into a ship in one turn. Lord knows I hate constructor spam - mostly because there are just too many gosh-darned resources; you'd think the galaxy had durantium atoms instead of hydrogen - but this would be a good place to let the player 'add-on' to his shipyards and increase their 'build-per-turn' cap.

One other quick thing - let every starbase add-on module add to the starbase's hull by 50 points or so. So what if it grows to be a thousand points - fleets of 5 mediums or 8 small hulls can pop a standard soapbubble - um, starbase - with ease.

We ARE going to get rid of the per planet spending wheel. I know many of you like it but it is just incredibly tedious to deal with and violates the general spirit of GalCiv (there's a reason we never had this in previous GalCivs, it's not like we hadn't thought of it). In its place will be something different. We'd like to hear what YOU would like to see in there.

1. The governor system in 1.3 is okay. It significantly reduces one's ability to specialize, but I can eventually come to terms with that. I'd really like the ability to select a governor from the beginning of the game. If I must research to get better ones, fine, but being unable to specialize at the start of the game feels like a handicap.

2. Even better would be custom governors with custom production settings, but you guys seem to have avoided that for now.

3. I want manufacturing governors to be split up into military and social focus. The tier 1 governors shift production 10% in the desired direction. I see no reason you cannot apply that 10% to the social-military slider as well.

4. I want a project that sets the social-military slider to 100% military. If my manufacturing specialized planet is not building improvements, I want it to spend that manufacturing on ships, not culture/wealth/research projects, for which the planet is ill-suited.

5. Give me a toggle in planet governance to turn on/off AI building improvements. Improvement building was never a big hassle, and in fact is fun gameplay given that we have adjacency and tile bonuses. I do not trust the AI to build improvements how I would like it to, now or in the future. Check out the picture below. The AI governor destroyed improvements to make room for farms after I unlocked them. It did not attempt to make use of adjacency, it did not attempt to make use of the "floodplain" tile, and once my planet reaches max population, its approval is going to suck. No wonder it's easy to be the AI so soundly!

I just took a look at the optin. I will reserve my judgement on the changes of planetary management till I played a game with it - which will probably be to late to contribute to the development discussion. But I noticed two things I want to mention here.

1. The sort options in the ship- and planet list are neat. However: Sort by name seems to be missing. Why? Is that so hard? Is the alphabet the sworn enemy of GalCiv-developers? Also there seems to be no sorting for starbases and rally points. Why?

I will also tell you why sorting by name is important to me. First off sometimes an AI player tells me that my starbase "Deep Space 9" is annoying them. Naturally I tell them to suck it, but afterwards I'm curios where this starbase is. Well, I kind of have a lot of starbases and since there is no way to sort the list by name or search for it, I have to scroll through the list and read every entry or I have to scroll around the map. Second I tend to name my fleets after the starsystems they are supposed to operate in. Also I add letters in front of planet names to give me an idea of what there primary focus is. I name shipyards to kind of group them by regions of space ... yeah, I do all kinds of things with the names of stuff. So naturally, I need to be able to sort and search by those names.

2. The fleet-category in the command-tab only has the option to command fleets that are currently going to planets, starbases or rally points and I only can send them to those same objects. Well, that is 99% of the time useless for me. I'm kind of a peaceful player spending a lot time in peace. So the war fleets just sit around and guard places. In war I direct the fleets to the targets - which will not appear in those lists. Also again we are unable to sort those lists, so to send a fleet to a certain starbase, you again have to read every entry in the starbase list.

What I would really need is a more focused tactical view of the main map, to be able to more efficiently understand the tactical situation. In the commands window I could use a list of fleets which I can sort by name *cough* and than select the ones I want. I want to be able to send them to a destination without landing on it and also not limited to my own stuff. Meaning I want to be able to say that fleets "Mars 1", "Centauri 4" and "Transport 3" should go towards the planet Iconia, the fleet "Mars 2" should go to Starbase "Deep Space 4" - which both are held by the enemy. Because that is what I do on the map. If the govern-window is supposed to help me with that, it must be able to do the same operation but with far less clicks.I could also use a list similiar to the colonies list, that shows me where the fleets are and what they are doing. The list could for example show the nearest colonized planet and how far it is away. The list could show if the fleet is going somewhere or if it is guarding, how many enemy or friendly ships are in its vicinity.

Such tools would be useful for managing my fleets and conducting war. But to be honest, this weird "going to" command you give us ... I can't even conceive of a situation where this would be useful.